Marcel Deat

Marcel Deat (7 March 1894-5 January 1955) was Minister of Labor of Vichy France under Pierre Laval's fascist government during World War II.

Biography
Marcel Deat was born in Guerigny, France in 1894, and he served as a captain in the French Army during World War I. After 1918, he became a philosophy teacher in Reims, and he joined the SFIO. He left the party in 1933 to co-found the short-lived "Socialist Party", and he supported the 1938 Munich Agreement and opposed entering war over the city of Danzig at the start of World War II in 1939. Deat turned increasingly towards fascism during the 1930s, and he became one of the leading opponents of Marshal Philippe Petain's "moderation" during the German occupation of France during the war. He founded the National Popular Rally in January 1941 but was unable to rally all French fascists behind it, and he failed to win German support for his aim. In March 1944, however, he became the Minister of Labor under Pierre Laval. After the war, he fled to an Italian monastery, so his death sentence was never carried out.